“I feel like the soul of writing is character, and the writers I admire the most are those who can evoke characters who are nothing like themselves.”

Myke Cole joins the show to talk about military fantasy and his fantasies about the military, his journey from IT to CIA to merc to Coast Guard to fantasy writer, his biggest nerd-out author moments, how he came up with his “Black Hawk Down Meets The X-Men” Shadow Ops series, what PTSD feels like, the importance of having a plan for crisis management, reconciling his art, politics, job, and readership, and more! Give it a listen! And go buy his Shadow Ops books, starting with Control Point!

“I take a tremendous amount of pride in being a difficult person to kill.”

Unfortunately, before you can get to it, you’ve gotta wade through nearly 15 minutes of intro! It’s almost Marc Maron-like! If you wanna get past me talking about getting stood up by a publisher and discovering that I’ve become an anecdote in a business book (as well as my Myke intro), then skip to the 14:30 mark! Now go listen to the show!

“Intelligence, at its root, is breaking the laws of other countries and stealing their shit. I understand it’s necessary, but it’s not nice and it’s not ethical.”

As a security contractor, government civilian and military officer, Myke Cole’s career has run the gamut from Counterterrorism to Cyber Warfare to Federal Law Enforcement. He’s done three tours in Iraq and was recalled to serve during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

All that conflict can wear a guy out. Thank goodness for fantasy novels, comic books, late night games of Dungeons and Dragons and lots of angst-fueled writing.

“How can you keep experimenting within your own work? When they say people reinvent themselves, they just mean they put on new clothes or something.”

Ben Katchor rejoins the show to talk about the 25th anniversary edition of Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay (Drawn & Quarterly)! We talk about those aforementioned pleasures, the boredom of the modern flaneur, his evolution from genre fandom to “literary comics” (my awful term, not his), the danger in comics becoming over-academic, the challenges of writing a world history, and more! Give it a listen! And go buy Cheap Novelties!

“You spend the first 20 years of your life figuring out how the culture works, another 20 years figuring out how to make a living in that culture, and maybe the last part you’re in oblivion, saying, ‘What did I do?'”

We also get into the tedium of the latest iteration of New York City, the experience of capitalism’s end-game, why his comics are a product of a unique moment, his discovery of Undergrounds, the challenges of making anything new, how he found a readership that isn’t interested in comics, and more! Now go listen to the show!

“All these people who weren’t born or were babies when Cheap Novelties came out, now they’re going to look at it and say, ‘What does this mean? How does this even relate to us?'”

Ben Katchor lives in New York, where he is an Associate Professor at Parsons School of Design—The New School. As director of Parsons’ Illustration program, he runs The New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium, a weekly lecture series for the study of text-image work. He has been the recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Along with his long-running comic-strip work — Julius Knipl, Real-Estate Photographer, The Cardboard Valise, Hotel & Farm, The Jew of New York, and a monthly strip for Metropolis magazine—Katchor has also collaborated with musician Mark Mulcahy on a number of works for musical theatre. These works include The Rosenbach Company (a tragi-comedy about the life and times of Abe Rosenbach, the preeminent rare-book dealer of the 20th century); The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, or, The Friends of Dr. Rushower, an absurdist romance about the chemical emissions and addictive soft-drinks of a ruined tropical factory-island; A Checkroom Romance, about the culture and architecture of coat-checkrooms; and Up From the Stacks, about a page working the stacks of the New York Public Library in 1975. Katchor is the only cartoonist to have won an Obie for Best New American Work, for his libretto and drawings for The Carbon Copy Building, a collaboration with Bang on a Can. His TED Talk is titled Comics of Bygone New York. He is on Twitter at benkatchor.

We also get into how absurdism insulates him from this modern world, the impact of Brexit on British culture, why his humor was always a tough sell in the UK, the paradox of political cartoonists’ work being bought by the politicians they ridicule, the joy of ukulele, the experience of having his work knocked off by other artists, the time he got a Cartier commission, and more. Now go listen to the show!

“European culture is important to me. Having that snatched away by Brexit, well, that’s something no one discussed in any of the debates.”

“I love finding people who are obsessed with things. People who devote their lives to things are my obsession.”

Writer and Twitter provocateur Hayley Campbell joins the show for a conversation about her inability to describe her job (don’t call her a “content provider”). We talk about growing up in comics royalty (her dad is the great cartoonist Eddie Campbell), Alan Moore’s magic tricks, nearly losing a comic-shop job because of her lack of a college degree, the celebrity retweet she’s proudest of, and having an accidental career path, no fixed home, and a traumatic brain injury that gooses with her memory (and whether those three things are somehow connected). Also, we get into how she recently embarrassed Jonathan Safran Foer, and more! Give it a listen! And go buy her first book, The Art of Neil Gaiman (Ilex/Harper). And for God’s sake, go follow her on Twitter!

We also get into her obsession with obsessives, becoming the oldest person at her BuzzFeed office in her early 30s, the insanely creepy Moebius comic she read as a kid, the glories of Australian dentistry, digging through old girlie magazines to research her book on Neil Gaiman, and why she loves writing about boxing. We also compare notes on doing interviews with people whose work you love. Now go listen to the show!

“Dad won’t join Twitter because he’s afraid I’ll have more followers than him, and he’ll be ‘Hayley Campbell’s dad.'”

“It’s an existential question, not a historical one: what kinds of places make you feel at home? Some people feel at home nowhere, and some feel at home everywhere. I’m myself, wherever I am.”

Willard Spiegelman returns to the show to talk about his wonderful new essay collection, Senior Moments: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (FSG). We get into the process of deaccessioning, Mark Strand’s advice on paring down to 100 books, Willard’s take on 45 years living in Dallas (and what he’ll miss about it now that he’s retired), the joy of getting lost in Italy, the best way to pick someone up in NYC, the contrast of his 50th high school and college reunions, and more. Give it a listen! And go buy Senior Moments!

We also mix it up over the aesthetic sunk cost fallacy, ponder being alone in the middle of a crowd, compare Japan and Hungary relative to being linguistically uprooted (I argue that Hungary is tougher, because it looks like you should be able to piece together the language), examine the pharaonic idea of hoarding, and listen to time’s winged chariot hurrying near. Now go listen to the show!

“I’m much too old to write a memoir. That’s the province of 25-year-olds.”

“I’m able to be what people want me to be when I’m behind the bar or playing music, but I’m not a performer by nature, so it’s not an easy transition. With comics, the joy I feel when I’m drawing comes through.”

Cartoonist Leslie Stein joins the show to celebrate her new book, Time Clock (Fantagraphics)! We talk about her amazing diary comics (recently collected in Bright-Eyed At Midnight), why she picked a really weird name for her ongoing comics project (Eye of the Majestic Creature), the artistic benefits of boredom, finding her style(s), drawing for online vs. print (and color vs. b/w), her strategy for surviving comic cons and festivals, how she got a gig publishing comics at VICE, the disconcerting discovery that she had an audience, and how she strikes a balance of cartooning, being in a band, and tending bar! Give it a listen! And buy her newest books, Time Clock and Bright-Eyed At Midnight (my personal fave of all her work)!

“I’ve been thinking about this one project for five years, and that’s been keeping me from starting it. I feel like it could be amazing or it could be terrible, and I just have to spend a few years on it to figure that out.”

This episode was recorded at the School of Visual Arts, where Leslie studied. Past guest Nathan Fox, chair of the MFA Visual Narrative Department at SVA, offered us a space to record. SVA’s low-residency MFA Visual Narrative Program includes two years online and three summers in NYC. The program focuses on the growing need for original content creators in advertising, video games, picture books, graphic novels, film, comic arts, illustration and animation, and it prepares artists and authors to become innovators in the ever-evolving art of visual storytelling. Now go listen to the show!

“I started diary comics on a whim, which is how I approach everything.”

Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission of the artist. The conversation was recorded at the School of Visual Arts on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on the same setup, inside a closet in Des Allemands, LA. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. Photo of Ms. Stein by me.

“I’m not a foodie, but I love other people’s obsessions about food. I love watching Kings of Pastry and seeing two men carefully bisecting a pastry and sharing it. They’ve got the most serious looks own their faces.”

Rising comics star — don’t blame me, that’s what Publishers Weekly just called her — Andrea Tsurumi joins the show to talk about her new collection, Why Would You Do That? (Hic & Hoc Publications). We get into her off-kilter sense of humor and why I love it, why she chose that title, the most sadistic children’s book ever written and why she adapted it, the comics industry’s saving grace (it’s too small to fail), staged photos during the Civil War, the challenge of teaching comics, her attempt at a work/art/life balance, the comics, cartoons and picture books that influenced/warped her, why she left New York, the truth about cakes vs. pies, and more! Give it a listen! And buy Why Would You Do That?!

“The problem with freelance illustration and comics is just that there’s not enough money, especially if you’re living in New York City. If you don’t have enough money, you don’t have enough time. And if you don’t have enough money or time, you have to make hard choices, and you’ll never have enough wiggle room to have a healthy balance.”

This episode was recorded at the School of Visual Arts, where Andrea studied and where she does some teaching nowadays (that’s her standing next to a print by Jim Rugg). Past guest Nathan Fox, chair of the MFA Visual Narrative Department at SVA, offered us a space to record. SVA’s low-residency MFA Visual Narrative Program includes two years online and three summers in NYC. The program focuses on the growing need for original content creators in advertising, video games, picture books, graphic novels, film, comic arts, illustration and animation, and it prepares artists and authors to become innovators in the ever-evolving art of visual storytelling. Now go listen to the show!

“You know when you’re growing up and you have these moments of dramatic realization of the obvious? That’s what the growing up is.”

Andrea Tsurumi is an illustrator and cartoonist who likes history, absurdity, dogs and monsters (in no particular order). Her first book, Why Would You Do That? is out now from Hic & Hoc. A lifelong book nerd, she received an English BA from Harvard and an MFA in illustration from the School of Visual Arts. She now lives in Philadelphia and likes her ice cream angry.

“What I’m passing on to people is . . . the capacity to have fun. To have a life that you can build around. Not branding, and not the demands of the marketplace, but what you really think and what you want.”

After a remarkable 40-year career, publisher Malcolm Margolin is retiring from Heyday Books in Berkeley. He joins the show to talk about the liberation of being unimportant, building a roundhouse to fall apart, the “dress code” necessary to make things palatable to a mainstream audience, his efforts to chronicle California Indian culture, his next act(s), and more! Give it a listen!

“In some ways I feel regret; the irony is that I was so active in preserving other people’s cultures and languages, but I let mine go.”

We also talk about the craziest golf foursome ever, the two-week-plus run of LSD that may have changed his life, his hatred of salesmanship (and environmentalists), the publishing revolution of the ‘70s, how we learn to live in a world bigger than our capacity to understand it, the inscription he’d want on his headphone e’d what drew him to publishing all those years ago (the beautiful women)! Give it a listen!

And become a patron of this podcast via Patreon or Paypal to get access to bonus conversation with Malcolm and a list of all the books we talked about! (Also, here’s a free bonus page of all the great quotes from our conversation.)

“I’m an emotion junkie. If I can go more than a few hours without breaking into tears, it’s a wasted day.”

“These jam comics we did were like every cartoonist shining a thousand-watt light all at once into the reader’s brain.”

We also talk about how he became a late addition to the Zap lineup, where his interest in conspiracy theories began, the time he and Gilbert Shelton tried to convince the manager of a Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers-themed Amsterdam bar that they were the cartoonists behind it, what 40+ years in San Francisco has been like, the time someone named-dropped him to himself, and more! Give it a listen! And become a patron of this podcast via Patreon or Paypal to get access to bonus conversation with Paul and a list of all the books we talked about.

Long-time resident of San Francisco’s Mission, ground zero of the underground comics scene, Paul Mavrides is a member of the ZAP Comix collective, as well as a founding associate of the Church of the SubGenius, a rogue psychotronic religious cult, which he still serves as official apostate. His many collaborators have included Gilbert Shelton, Robert Crumb, film directors Alex Cox and Ron Mann, Survival Research Laboratories and The Residents, and he successfully fought a high-profile taxation and free speech case on behalf of cartoonists and comic book readers against the State of California.

“These days, we tend to think of identity as something chosen; we put on certain masks or we identify as this or that, culturally, ethnically or politically. Bellow is interested in something much more basic: who we really are.”

“Bellow once said that the reason writers had such messy personal lives is because they didn’t know what to do with the afternoon.”

We also talk about David’s experience as a professor, why writing is harder for today’s students, what it’s like to teach course called, “Is Life Worth Living?” and “The Human Situation”, which science fiction novels warped him as a youth, why we need Slow Reading in a Hurried Age, what contemporary books look like they’ll last, and why he eventually came around on Faulkner. Go listen!

“Canonicity is not where you find it, but where you make it.”

There’s a BIG list of books we talked about, but it’s only available to supporters of The Virtual Memories Show, so go to Patreon or Paypal and make your contribution to this podcast!

Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at David’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. Intro was recorded on the same setup. Photo of Mr. Mikics by me.